The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - October 28, 2025


BC NDP government very unpopular as anti-woke party gains traction

Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
John Rustad MLA Dallas Brody Angus Reid Karen Kirkpatrick Kevin Falcon Eleanor Sturko Bruce Bandman Amelia Boltby David Eby Sochi Green
Disaster： Another Canadian premier running anti-Trump ads in USA! Trump rejects Carney desperately trying to get a meeting with him!

Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

180.64

Word count

3,191

Sentence count

150

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Polling Update, Wyatt talks about the insane history of BC politics over the past four years, and why John Rustad is a repeat of what happened to the old BC Liberal Party and the BC Conservative Party.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.080 Ahoy everyone, Wyatt Claypool here back with another polling update video.
00:00:05.140 This time we're talking about the province of British Columbia.
00:00:08.920 And as somebody who actually works in BC politics, I gotta tell you,
00:00:13.800 it is nearly impossible to overemphasize just how insane BC provincial politics is.
00:00:20.480 In fact, before we talk about the Angus Reid poll I want to discuss today,
00:00:24.560 I want to tell you about the lore of BC politics over the past four years.
00:00:29.420 Because it's kind of funny watching things change so much, but also stay the exact same.
00:00:37.520 I'm going to get to that in just a second, but first I'm going to do my normal plugs, guys.
00:00:41.520 Hey, if you like the show, make sure to leave a like on this video.
00:00:44.860 Subscribe. If you are not yet a subscriber and you like hearing these polling updates,
00:00:49.000 I usually am at home with a whiteboard where I actually jot down all the stats,
00:00:52.940 but I'm working at the legislature right now, so I just have this hotel room to work with.
00:00:57.600 In fact, it's a very good hotel because it has white walls and the lighting's actually kind of nice.
00:01:02.120 And then if you are a subscriber, I just wanted to remind you,
00:01:05.220 if you haven't hit the notification bell, please hit the notification bell next to the subscribe button.
00:01:09.680 It will let you know whenever I've put out a new video,
00:01:12.320 which does help us on the algorithm a bit when people are able to watch it
00:01:15.740 sooner to when the video actually does come out.
00:01:19.020 Anyways, now we got to get into the story of BC politics over the past four years.
00:01:24.500 And I will make this very short.
00:01:27.320 So four years ago, we have two main parties in BC politics.
00:01:32.660 We have the BC NDP, we have the BC Liberals, and we also kind of have the BC Greens.
00:01:38.980 And within four years, we had the BC Liberal Party change its name to BC United.
00:01:44.520 We had the Liberals kick out John Rustad, who then restarted the BC Conservative Party.
00:01:48.980 Conservative Party shoots up.
00:01:50.100 BC United then takes a dirt nap, and then the Conservatives nearly win the election,
00:01:55.780 but come a little bit short, only like 400 votes across a few ridings,
00:01:59.920 and they would have been in government.
00:02:01.900 And now we are in a situation today where the BC Conservatives and John Rustad
00:02:07.280 looked at what happened to the Liberals slash United Party,
00:02:11.000 and they're saying, hey, how about we do that again?
00:02:14.480 How about we basically sabotage ourselves and take a dirt nap?
00:02:17.760 Remember, John Rustad was literally kicked out of the BC Liberal Party
00:02:23.020 by then-leader Kevin Falcon because he had made a comment about climate change
00:02:27.700 that nobody actually thinks is controversial,
00:02:29.740 but Kevin Falcon was trying to prove how tough he was
00:02:31.880 by kicking out somebody who had crossed him on an issue
00:02:35.020 and was not saying the BC Liberal Party orthodoxy.
00:02:38.420 And then you had another BC Liberal, although then the party was called BC United,
00:02:42.680 the timeline gets confusing.
00:02:43.760 Bruce Bandman joins John Rustad, they become an official party in the legislature,
00:02:48.520 and the polling really starts kicking off to the point where United starts
00:02:51.900 polling below the Conservatives, they completely stall out and die,
00:02:55.480 and people vote for the Conservatives because, hey,
00:02:58.020 it looks like it's actually going to bring real change.
00:03:01.600 Okay, post-2024 election, Rustad decides,
00:03:05.220 huh, change is cute and all, but I don't really want to do that,
00:03:08.100 let's just be the old BC United Party that basically just tells the government,
00:03:11.860 how about you do things a little bit better, and that's it.
00:03:15.380 They don't actually represent transformational change anymore,
00:03:18.420 it is just a party for policy wonks who think that instead of actually cutting tax and regulations,
00:03:24.380 how about we just pass better-looking policy.
00:03:27.460 It's all very tiring.
00:03:29.620 And now, because of all the shenanigans and Rustad kicking people out of the party left and right,
00:03:35.040 we now have a situation where history is once again repeating itself,
00:03:38.860 but let's hope that we actually get the good outcome this time,
00:03:42.460 because we now have the 1BC Party at 5% provincially.
00:03:47.740 This poll is the first one to put BC United in and have them over 1%.
00:03:52.800 I work for the 1BC Party, to be fair.
00:03:55.920 At the same time, I also basically make no money doing it.
00:03:58.980 I do this basically as a passion job, a passion project.
00:04:02.360 1BC, led by MLA Dallas Brody, is currently doing better than John Rustad was as the BC Conservative leader
00:04:11.800 a couple months into his time as the BC Conservative leader.
00:04:15.580 So 1BC is already taking off faster than the old BC Conservatives did when John Rustad took them over,
00:04:21.840 but the funny thing in all of this is that, in fact, the NDP is still below the BC Conservatives.
00:04:29.800 The BC Conservatives, who basically represent no real change from the current government,
00:04:35.320 they kind of oppose them on Sochi and they kind of oppose them on drug policy and all that stuff,
00:04:41.340 but the Conservatives, really, they only talk about healthcare and crime,
00:04:46.000 because those are safe issues.
00:04:47.500 They don't want to talk about the crazy land acknowledgement stuff everywhere
00:04:51.060 and UNDRIP and DRIPA and the trans policies and gender theory.
00:04:56.100 They don't want to talk about any of that stuff anymore because it's uncomfortable.
00:05:00.520 But because even though you could say the right is divided, in fact, the NDP is still doing really bad right now.
00:05:07.740 And this is something I'm going to have to combat a lot with 1BC. 1.00
00:05:11.260 1BC is not taking votes from the Conservatives.
00:05:14.120 The Conservatives are dumping votes over the side of their ship and we're collecting it,
00:05:18.580 but 1BC, in fact, is actually taking votes from the NDP as well.
00:05:23.840 Because when you look right here, I'm going to, this is, so overall, right here, 1BC is in yellow,
00:05:31.320 1BC is at 5, Greens are at 11, Conservatives are at 41, and the NDP is at 40.
00:05:36.960 But come over here to the interior, and 1BC is at 8%, Greens are at 7, Conservatives are at 55, and the NDP is at 28.
00:05:46.420 When I looked at numbers for the 1BC party and comparing it to past polls,
00:05:51.800 the 1BC party in places like Metro Vancouver and the Interior are actually taking votes almost equally from the BC Conservatives and the BC NDP.
00:06:02.800 Because one thing that's lacking in BC politics is a party that really kind of represents voters on a personal level.
00:06:10.760 I don't mean that from this kind of pretentious grassroots thing where we need more town halls,
00:06:16.260 where people get up and holler about what they don't like, and then the MLA's like, I agree with you.
00:06:21.380 I mean in the sense that 1BC talks like the average voter that is upset about the government.
00:06:27.580 They're not just tinkering around the edges, trying to find little things they slightly disagree with the NDP on to get upset about,
00:06:34.520 but they don't want to take on the big issues.
00:06:35.940 The 1BC party represents everyone who finds land acknowledgments annoying,
00:06:40.900 who thinks gender theory needs to be completely stripped out of schools,
00:06:44.260 who thinks that you actually should be shaming people for having drug addictions and forcing them into care.
00:06:49.760 You know, the kind of, like the blue-collar working-class guy who's really tired of elitist politicians,
00:06:58.300 who they'll kind of acknowledge there are problems, but they don't really get it.
00:07:02.760 They kind of talk about why the addictions problem's bad,
00:07:06.140 but they don't talk about re-stigmatizing drug users and shaming people for using drugs
00:07:11.200 and locking people up for as long as possible if they're dealing drugs and all that.
00:07:14.880 You have too many people who, I don't even know how to really describe it,
00:07:19.320 who are kind of, in the Conservative Party at least,
00:07:22.760 boring red Tories,
00:07:24.660 who talk about everything like all we need is a policy summit and we can solve this,
00:07:30.600 rather than, like, you know, the guys who think that the problem with the economy
00:07:33.500 is just that we need better supports for the forestry industry.
00:07:38.480 Not that we just need to slash taxes and regulations and let people do their own thing.
00:07:42.700 We need a policy summit to figure out the best stimulus package
00:07:46.600 to try and feed into the economy to boost us up.
00:07:49.500 That's what people really hate and they want a party that just wants to dismantle what we're currently doing.
00:07:55.860 They don't want it changed.
00:07:57.040 They want the current establishment of BC politics dismantled.
00:08:02.220 But now I need to show you guys some other things that should be quite concerning
00:08:06.280 if you're both the BC Conservatives as well as the BC NDP government.
00:08:11.840 And by the way, this poll probably actually underpoles 1BC a bit
00:08:15.520 because the Fraser Valley, they only have 1BC at 2% in the Fraser Valley.
00:08:20.540 And if you were at our rally in the Fraser Valley,
00:08:22.840 1BC was able to get out 210 people for our event, our opening town hall in Abbotsford.
00:08:30.100 You don't get over 210 people out on short notice for a party that has no popularity in the area.
00:08:36.380 If anything, the Fraser Valley may be one of our best regions right now.
00:08:39.680 And you could say 5%, you can't win, get out.
00:08:42.000 So we've only been operating for two months and we have three years until the next election.
00:08:46.740 Obviously, it is our duty as a party to push as hard as humanly possible
00:08:50.860 to make sure that as many people know about us as possible.
00:08:54.780 But look at this.
00:08:56.080 John Rustad, the current leader of the BC Conservative Party,
00:08:59.200 is in a leadership crisis because, frankly, nobody really likes him that much.
00:09:04.780 And so he's in the situation where a lot of his own party,
00:09:08.300 including his own party's board, want him to resign,
00:09:11.600 but they have no legal mechanism to actually get rid of him.
00:09:14.900 And so Rustad is just persisting along, refusing to give it up,
00:09:18.240 because I created this party and so why should I step down?
00:09:21.640 Even though he's just a massive roadblock for the Conservatives,
00:09:24.900 even getting close to winning the next election.
00:09:27.140 Because although this poll makes them look good,
00:09:29.280 that's more of a fatigue problem with the NDP than people actually liking the Conservatives.
00:09:34.420 Look at this result.
00:09:35.580 This is from the same poll.
00:09:36.600 If you were advising BC Conservative leader John Rustad,
00:09:39.960 what would you tell him to do?
00:09:42.940 And the options are red is resign as leader,
00:09:45.240 and blue is stay on and fight his detractors,
00:09:48.740 with gray obviously being not sure or can't save.
00:09:52.160 Overall, 59% of British Columbians think he should resign.
00:09:55.960 Only 13% of people think he should stay.
00:09:58.620 But you could say, well, that's a lot of partisan, green, and NDP voters
00:10:02.320 saying that he should resign, because of course they're going to say that.
00:10:05.180 Look at here.
00:10:06.820 Voted for the Conservative Party in 2024.
00:10:10.060 48% of people who voted Conservative in the last election think that John Rustad should resign.
00:10:15.300 41% of people who selected the Conservatives as the option they would vote for in this new election,
00:10:21.440 if a new election was called, say that he should also resign.
00:10:24.920 25% of people selecting Conservatives now think he should stay on.
00:10:28.080 20% who voted for the party in 2024 think that he should stay on. 0.96
00:10:33.840 That is pathetic numbers.
00:10:36.360 And in fact, usually there's 30% in both of these categories, a little more than that, 0.82
00:10:41.120 saying that they're not sure.
00:10:42.140 But remember, people who are not sure tend to usually mirror the opinions of those who are
00:10:48.440 already decided.
00:10:49.460 They just don't want to say.
00:10:50.500 But you as the NDP may be getting a bit cocky, thinking, well, if we call an election right
00:10:57.540 now, we would win because John Rustad is so unpopular.
00:11:00.460 The problem is, look at this.
00:11:03.940 How satisfied are you with the performance of the BC NDP government?
00:11:08.440 The total right now is 34% are satisfied and 56% are unsatisfied with 10% being unsure.
00:11:16.740 In fact, 11% of BC NDP voters in the last election are unsatisfied.
00:11:24.000 Or even, yeah, and this is provincial vote intent.
00:11:27.720 Currently, they are relying on 11% of people who don't actually like them to vote for them,
00:11:33.120 maybe because they think they're still better than the Greens and the Conservatives.
00:11:36.740 Although those people who voted NDP in the last election, over a quarter, 26%,
00:11:42.180 are unsatisfied with the current government.
00:11:44.600 These are terrible numbers for them.
00:11:46.740 And it gets even worse when I bring up this other chart.
00:11:49.860 I'm going to have to switch to X for this.
00:11:52.020 But when I bring up this other chart that shows that when you actually look at the satisfaction
00:11:56.720 level, it's not healthy at all.
00:12:00.440 The amount of people who are very satisfied is minuscule within that 33%.
00:12:07.540 Check this out from Canadian Projections on X.
00:12:12.800 This is from the Angus Reid poll, but they just put it in a nice visual way.
00:12:16.740 Satisfaction with the government.
00:12:19.140 Only 3% of people in British Columbia would rate themselves as very satisfied, with 30%
00:12:25.940 being somewhat satisfied, 23% being somewhat dissatisfied, but 33% being very dissatisfied.
00:12:32.720 Only 3% are sure that they like you.
00:12:36.180 You want, often it's hard to satisfy people in politics, but you want that number to be like
00:12:42.800 13, 15%.
00:12:45.420 If you want re-election, you need that number to be substantial, like a third of the people
00:12:51.140 who are going to vote for you, or at least a quarter of the people who are going to vote
00:12:54.420 for your party genuinely really like you.
00:12:57.640 3% means less than 10% of those who would vote NDP in the next election truly actually
00:13:04.100 think the government's doing a good job.
00:13:05.720 Like, just full-on good stuff.
00:13:08.020 They're relying on a lot of people who are somewhat satisfied.
00:13:10.580 So, if you add those two numbers together, 33%, that means even if they won every single
00:13:18.100 one of those voters, which that's not actually fully likely because they're going to get some
00:13:22.120 people who are somewhat satisfied, but they vote Green, they would still need to find another
00:13:26.540 portion of people to vote for them who are unsatisfied or very unsatisfied, which sounds
00:13:31.820 just about impossible.
00:13:33.320 Because someone who's unsatisfied is probably not going to show up.
00:13:37.720 Yes, if you put the lever in front of them and told them, would you vote NDP or Conservative,
00:13:42.420 they may pull the NDP lever, but they're probably not going to drive themselves to the polls to
00:13:46.440 vote for a party and keep in a government that they don't really like all that much.
00:13:51.860 And this is where one BC party has a lot of room to grow.
00:13:56.580 We have a BC Conservative party led by an extremely unpopular leader.
00:14:01.540 I mean, John Rustad literally has a negative 40 approval rating.
00:14:05.980 That should be impossible to get that bad of an approval rating.
00:14:10.300 Now, technically, you also have somebody like Dallas Brody who doesn't have a positive approval
00:14:15.860 rating, but literally right now, nobody in BC politics has a positive approval rating.
00:14:23.620 Plus, there's so much anti-Brody propaganda.
00:14:26.920 Obviously, she's not going to have a great approval rating. 0.99
00:14:29.780 But 10% isn't too bad right now, considering all of the media attacks.
00:14:33.920 26% have an unfavorable or very unfavorable rating, but she's doing better than the leader
00:14:38.540 of the center BC party, Karen Kirkpatrick.
00:14:41.080 And again, there's a lot more work to be done in promoting Dallas Brody.
00:14:45.740 And of course, that's part of my job.
00:14:47.960 And again, we are at the low point for her popularity because everything that most people
00:14:52.520 have seen has been negative, where now, as she's going to get more attention, she's going
00:14:57.800 to be able to pitch herself directly to British Columbians with her own social media and in
00:15:02.560 independent media in order to build up her popularity.
00:15:05.660 Even but that that being said, Dallas Brody is only 1% less popular in terms of the net ratings
00:15:12.880 compared to the current premier, David Eby.
00:15:15.480 And of course, John Rustad's actual ratings are abysmal when you look at what people think
00:15:22.160 of him.
00:15:22.440 It's absolutely ridiculous how few people actually like him whatsoever.
00:15:28.300 We don't need to look at any more at these stats.
00:15:30.720 But yes, BC politics is currently insane.
00:15:33.780 The Greens are on the rise, which is actually also hurting the NDP right now.
00:15:37.600 And if center BC is able to get two MLAs, which is actually not impossible because there
00:15:42.320 are currently two very center left-leaning former conservative MLAs sitting as independents,
00:15:48.560 Eleanor Sturko and Amelia Boltby, who could, in theory, take over the center BC party with
00:15:53.620 Karen Kirkpatrick and be the two MLAs in the House that give them party status.
00:15:58.440 And guess what?
00:15:59.180 That would be very good for everyone on the right, because if center BC gains MLAs and
00:16:04.220 they start getting momentum, they aren't going to be taking votes from the conservatives very
00:16:07.620 much.
00:16:07.880 It's mostly going to be federal liberals who typically vote NDP in the metro Vancouver area
00:16:13.420 and on Vancouver Island and in places like Kelowna, who are going to be voting center BC.
00:16:18.080 They probably won't win a seat, but in an election, they could grab four or five percent of the
00:16:21.560 vote after a couple of years of marketing themselves.
00:16:24.020 And they could keep, you know, 12 percent of federal liberal voters out of the hands of
00:16:28.260 the BC NDP that they absolutely need to be able to win the next election.
00:16:31.960 But again, I also saw a stat in this out in this Angus Reid poll.
00:16:37.220 It's not worth bringing up, but it was asking people how aware are they of the whole leadership
00:16:42.500 crisis issue going on inside of the BC Conservative Party?
00:16:46.160 And, you know, what do you know about John Rustad and what he's been doing?
00:16:49.420 It's a small group of people who've been following politics that closely to even know about it,
00:16:55.200 which is great news, because if people are barely paying attention to that big scandal,
00:16:59.820 they probably don't even, most people don't even really know what 1BC is yet.
00:17:03.680 And if you're already winning five percent of people when most people have no clue who you are
00:17:08.700 yet, it means that you have a very high conversion rate with those who have heard of you.
00:17:13.460 So we're probably winning five percent of the 12 percent of people who even know enough about
00:17:18.840 us to say yes or no to the party.
00:17:21.220 But anyways, with that all being said, thank you guys for watching this video.
00:17:25.940 Check out the 1BC Party in the description below and pinned at the top of the comments.
00:17:29.820 If you're curious and you live in British Columbia.
00:17:32.440 But other than that, I just want to encourage you guys to like, share, subscribe,
00:17:35.900 do all that fantastic stuff.
00:17:37.540 And I will see you guys all next time.